A couple serving probation for the 2009 death of their toddler after they turned to prayer instead of a doctor could face new charges now that another son has died.

‘Faith healing’

Herbert and Catherine Schaible belong to a fundamentalist Christian church that believes in faith healing. They lost their 8-month-old son, Brandon, last week after he suffered from diarrhea and breathing problems for at least a week, and stopped eating. Four years ago, another son died from bacterial pneumonia.

Prosecutors said Tuesday that a decision on charges will be made after they get the results of an autopsy. Catherine Schaible’s attorney, Mythri Jayaraman, cautioned against a rush to judgment, and said the couple are good parents deeply distraught over the loss of another child.

A jury convicted the Schaibles of involuntary manslaughter in the January 2009 death of their 2-year-old son, Kent. The boy’s symptoms had included coughing, congestion, crankiness and a loss of appetite. His parents said he was eating and drinking until the last day, and they had thought he was getting better. The Schaibles were sentenced to 10 years’ probation.

‘Forbidding Christians from visiting doctors’

At a hearing Monday, a judge told the couple they had violated the terms of their probation, noting the Schaibles had told investigators that they prayed to God to make Brandon well instead of seeking medical attention. Prosecutors on Monday sought to have the couple jailed, but Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge Benjamin Lerner permitted them to remain free because their seven other children had been placed in foster care.

Herbert Schaible, 44, and his 43-year-old wife grew up in the First Century Gospel Church in northeast Philadelphia and have served as teachers there. The church’s website has a sermon titled “Healing — From God or Medicine?” that quotes Bible verses purportedly forbidding Christians from visiting doctors or taking medicine.

Would you opt for prayer over medical treatment if your child got sick? Should Herbert and Catherine Schaible be jailed for the death of their second child?

Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he’s long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife. But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven.

“According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent,” Alexander writes in the cover story of this week’s edition of Newsweek.

Alexander says he first found himself floating above clouds before witnessing, “transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer like lines behind them.”

He claims to have been escorted by an unknown female companion and says he communicated with these beings through a method of correspondence that transcended language. From there, Alexander claims to have traveled to “an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting.” He believes this void was the home of God. After recovering from his meningitis-induced coma, he chronicled his experience in a new book, “Proof of Heaven: A neurosurgeon’s journey into the afterlife,” which will be published in late October.

“I’m still a doctor, and still a man of science every bit as much as I was before I had my experience,” Alexander writes. “But on a deep level I’m very different from the person I was before, because I’ve caught a glimpse of this emerging picture of reality. And you can believe me when I tell you that it will be worth every bit of the work it will take us, and those who come after us, to get it right.”

Do you believe in life after death? Tell us about your own near-death experience and how it changed your way of thinking!